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How much of your audience is fake?

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Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#81

Post by meeper16 »

jgalt212 wrote: post #48
meeper16 wrote: post #14

This is exactly why social networks are far less valuable than properties like Google that started with algorithmic foundations as opposed to rebranding the next geocities. I'll never trust facebooks numbers on their fake profiles especially when Yahoo kills close to 1mil fake profiles every month and while Ashley Madison was rife with them. Reddit started this way too, with tons of bots, fake accounts etc. We just d…

yes, lots of scepticism here, but everyone (at least everyone who didn't get down-voted) seemed to buy into FB's claim of 1 billion users in a single day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10131975

Half are bots and there's no incentive for facebook to really find out which accounts are fake, astroturfed, bot-driven and which one's are not.

Instagram, with some of its fake accounts, now with its claimed 400million accounts, overlap with facebooks.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#82

Post by thebournepopret »

vorg wrote: post #72
downandout wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally know the founder of an SEO company that is running around 50 fake searches per second as I type this.

Some outfits don't just do fake searches but also fake downloads. E.g. visit https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics#stat... then click on date range "1 year" and wonder why the daily download numbers suddenly multiplied by 10 in late May. You'll have trouble believing the 2.5 million download number for Groovy from Bintray, and wonder how long they've been running the same ploy with Maven.

Late May is the beginning of intern/coop season and Groovy and Maven are popular technologies used by software engineering interns.

Could explain some of the spike.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#83

Post by Gustomaximus »

This is such a re-hashed story. While not good, it's not the big issue people seem to think they keep discovering.

For non-brand advertising this is easily solved by down funnel tracking. Any marketer worth their salt tracks to the 'ultimate goal' and will avoid shadier networks by results based tracking. End of the day marketing value comes down to a ROMI metric. It doesn't matter if 50% of the impressions are fake as long as the total investment pays off. For brand marketing I simply follow the networks that show DM performance as an indicator of quality display.

Generally the worse point for junk clicks is mobile display - particularly in app. Id never advise RON campaigns here without tight monitoring. I like to build white lists rather than a black lists for companies where I handle their marketing for display on mobile.

Interestingly I've been noticing increasing bot clicks on Google search ads. If I can detect this is makes me really suspicious why Google, with all their data/prowess is not.

This would really make interesting reading if someone wants to show this to the world. Even more interesting than the 2012 FB 80% bot claim: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/30/startup-claims-80-of-its-fa...

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#84

Post by joshuab2893 »

geocar wrote: post #45
inversionOf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i.e. incompetence and not malice The primary revenue source of many of these sites are ad clicks (impressions often don't matter). If the function paying the bills are ad clicks, and site stickiness really isn't a thing anymore (nowadays we're all directed by social news, Facebook, etc. Few of us visit specific sites), why not abuse the users that do come by. A principal web design facet in the past was the notion th…

Actually the Myspace video ads are being sold as video (6-8$CPM on exchanges; I've seen it as high as 18$CPM to advertisers), so there's no expectation that they click. Of the traffic I observed, I was able to (in a few hours) classify 80% of the traffic as fraud. I don't think there were any legitimate users on these sites except ad network operators verifying whitelists and agency teams showing off how much myspace…

Hey I'm one of the authors of the article. Can I pick your brain a bit? jbrustein at bloomberg dot net.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#85

Post by cwyers »

meeper16 wrote: post #75
forgetsusername wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* those fake profiles are still real humans, right?* This is true. I'm more thinking along the lines of "we have 1 billion active users!" > you can still do demographic targeting, no? This I'm not so sure about. Some targeting, sure. But the fake profiles make it more difficult, since the demographic data is also fake.

These are completely fake, synthetic profiles. This is why you can buy them here: https://www.google.com/search?q=buy+facebook+accounts&oq=buy...

From the post that I was replying to, posted by the person you're replying to:

> Indeed. I was working for a Facebook gaming company around 2010. Through the "recruit a friend" bonuses and "have X friends click this" mechanics, there were incentives to simply make fake accounts to obtain the goals. We looked at our users and figured about half were fake Facebook accounts. I have to imagine the numbers for other companies, like Zynga, were similar, as they used the same mechanics.

You're NOT talking about the same thing.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#86

Post by meeper16 »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #83

This is such a re-hashed story. While not good, it's not the big issue people seem to think they keep discovering. For non-brand advertising this is easily solved by down funnel tracking. Any marketer worth their salt tracks to the 'ultimate goal' and will avoid shadier networks by results based tracking. End of the day marketing value comes down to a ROMI metric. It doesn't matter if 50% of the impressions are fake…

Try this: Inside a counterfeit Facebook farm https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10275631

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#87

Post by harry8 »

cwyers wrote: post #37
forgetsusername wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about in the social networking space. Indeed. I was working for a Facebook gaming company around 2010. Through the "recruit a friend" bonuses and "have X friends click this" mechanics, there were incentives to simply make fake accounts to obtain the goals. We looked at our users and figured about half were fake Facebook accounts. I have to imagine the numbers fo…

From an advertiser's point of view, those fake profiles are still real humans, right? So your ad is still being seen, and those Facebook profiles probably share enough of the social graph with a real Facebook profile that you can still do demographic targeting, no?

If I have 100 fake accounts, how many of them have access to my wallet to buy what you're selling in the ad? If 100 of them click your ad, how should you count it "100 potential customers" or 1. Most of the fakes seem to represent a 0% chance of making a sale.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#89

Post by davidgerard »

mattmanser wrote: post #79
davidgerard wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a press release and reporting of a press release. It's a blank assertion it's false in the face of a research result. It carries no weight.

Gizmodo themselves admit they were wrong. The reporter originally claimed there were something like 5,000,000 women bots and 12,000 real women. Turns out the numbers were more like the other way around. I'm not linking to her article admitting her mistake as it's pathetic how she tries to cover up her mistake with more allegations based on incomplete data. This is a perfect example of why blogs shouldn't be relied on…

You're citing something that you then refuse to cite.

This is not a convincing argument in any way at all. You're behaving indistinguishably from someone just making shit up.

Re: How much of your audience is fake?

#90

Post by davidgerard »

mattmanser wrote: post #78
cwyers wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Press statements aren't delivered under oath, I am not exactly going to take a press release with no details as gospel truth.

The gizmodo reporter herself admitted she was wrong. And then launched another attack to try and hide her cockup.

[citation still needed]
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